solo exhibition If I Trace Home...

The most difficult questions are often those that confront what is nearest to us; just as the question of the “self” touches the deepest layers of consciousness, the question of “home” draws us inward with equal depth. At first glance, “home” appears to be a self-evident and familiar concept; yet each time we try to articulate it or think it through, we are drawn into the most intricate layers of our existential and perceptual experience. To think about home is to think about one’s relation to the surrounding world; an experience in which speaking of home simultaneously becomes a form of exposure—to the gaze, judgments, and interpretations of others. To speak of home, we seem to need a space that is both intimate and safe.

Since the late twentieth century, and with the growing emphasis on individuality and the private sphere, art has increasingly engaged with varied presentations of private imagery within public contexts. For each of us, home is a private matter that, through shared experience, finds its way into public expression. The significance of these images lies not simply in the public exposure of the individual or the transgression of established taboos, but in the role they assume in the formation of subjectivity and the constitution of identity. Private photographs contain a dense array of ostensibly trivial and mundane data. For their owners, these visual traces are imbued with subtle meanings that remain only partially legible to others. In this sense, one may present even the most private images without significant disclosure of their underlying informational content, while a more complete understanding of the images remains available to oneself and those in one’s immediate circle.

If I Trace Home … emerges from a dialogue among artists who seek to rearticulate the concept of home not as a geographical location, but as a narrative and intersubjective space. Here, home is understood not merely as shelter or a set of enclosing walls, but as a constellation of meanings—a complex structure of human relations, cultural signs, and memories inscribed within the material fabric of walls, doors, windows, and domestic furnishings. Rather than foregrounding a unified representation of home, the exhibition is grounded in a decelerated mode of looking and thinking, in attentive observation, and in the dialogue between the works; a method that reveals the complexity and multilayered structure of home. This exhibition seeks not only to reconsider the meaning of home, but also to reflect on the act of representation itself: how “home,” within personal, social, cultural, and political contexts, is continuously performed, experienced, and reproduced.

The photographs in If I Trace Home … often offer little when encountered in isolation. The images are shaped within specific contexts and become legible through them. Accordingly, each series presented in the exhibition has also been published in the form of an independent booklet, allowing the juxtaposition of images to construct a discursive space through which the artist’s intended representation may unfold.

This exhibition was originally scheduled for January 2026. Given the current social and political conditions in our country and the events of recent months, the very idea of home has undergone a profound shift. It is no longer stable, no longer assured. For some, its most basic attribute—a roof over one’s head—is already gone. Today in Iran, home, and everything that gathers around it, exists in a critical state—fragile in the most immediate sense. A home can disappear in an instant. And then it is no longer there.